No, you may not solo these instances

“Additional Instances cannot be launched, please try again later.”

Annoying! I think I started seeing these messages towards the beginning of Wrath, although I’m not sure exactly when they became part of the regular process of entering an instance. But why are we getting them?

According to Blizzard, each realm has a limit to the number of instances that can be active at a time. This is to prevent the instance servers from becoming overloaded and performing poorly. From the sound of it, there hasn’t always been an instance cap, but it has been around for quite some time. I’m guessing that before Wrath, there probably wasn’t as much need for a cap anyway. There were less instances, less oppertunities to solo instances and less reasons to fool around in lowbie instances. Raiding wasn’t as accessible and, if you trust press releases, there just weren’t as many players back then.

Are all instances equal? I wasn’t able to find any reliable information on the topic. Speaking from personal experience, I can’t recall ever having trouble entering Ulduar or Naxx, I’ve rarely had trouble entering VoA and the few times I’ve had the error message, I was able to enter after a few tries. I’ve often received the error message message while trying to enter Wrath 5-mans, but I’ve always been able to enter after 5-10 minutes. Pre-BC instances, though, are a different story…. It once took me an hour to enter AQ40, and it wasn’t even prime gaming time. Is there a priority list for instances, such as Wrath raids, Wrath 5-mans, pre-Wrath 5 mans, pre-Wrath raids? Are the difference expansion instances simply on different servers? My experience suggests that these are possibilities, but unfortunatly, the information available out there is pretty limited and my meager computor knowledge prevents me from making any sort of educated guess.

A few Blue posts seem to indicate that they have been addressing the issue for a few months already, however balancing the demand for instances with available ressources (which are apparently much less than the average forum poster would like to believe) might not be as easy as gamers would like.

So what do we do while trying to get into instances?
– Save our soloing, lowbie instance farming, running buddies through instances for quiet times.
– If we’re doing something weird like running an low level instance the way it was designed to be run, use the time spent searching for the last 2-3 party members to hop in an out of the instance.
– Use peak times to PUG raids and 80 heroics.
– Be a pest to others trying to enter our instances.
– Read instance QQ in general chat and in the customer service forum

What shouldn’t we do while trying to get into instances?
– Try similar instances – if one’s not working, they’re all not working. We might be able to enter another one, but its just luck.
– Actually participate in general chat and the WoW forums. C’mon, we’re above that.

I hear there is hope for us lowbie instance addicts. In the meanwhile, I think I’m going to go read a book. Laterz!